Childline

Childline

Project Area: Vikarabad

Overview

Since August 2015, MVF has been partnering with the Telangana government on Childline, a helpline initiative designed to safeguard and protect children. 14 volunteers, including 3 women, attend to the needs of children in 600 villages spread out over 18 mandals.

Donor -Childline India, Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India

Project Updates

The Childline centre in Vikarabad has a 24-hour response team, and has responded to 1600 distress up to March 2017, most of them dealing with child labour, especially in hotels, harassment at work and at home, the need for shelters and hostels for children, child marriage, child trafficking, lost children, either those who have wandered out of or come in to the area, and child abuse, including sexual abuse.

Since each case requires an immediate, complex and personalized systemic response from a wide-ranging set of government officials. To do this, MVF has constituted a Childline advisory board (CAB) comprising of government officers at the divisional and mandal levels. It has also fixed meetings every 3 months with this board in collaboration with various government departments to review the response of these departments to each call to Childline.

Despite these odds, Childline has begun to make an impact due to the fact that it has been publicized in newspapers and by distributing pamphlets.